by Gin Phillips
“How old are you?” she asks the girl.
“Sixteen.”
The girl sounds proud. Joan has nearly forgotten that feeling—to feel delighted with your age.
“So what happened?” she asks again, because the more she knows about the gunmen, the better. “When the men came in here?”
The girl leans back farther against her cardboard box. Her jaw works slightly, like she is sucking on a cough drop or chewing gum.
“At first?” the girl says. “At first I heard a scream outside. But there’s screaming sometimes, you know? Like kids running around—you know that elephant statue that sprays water? And they let them feed the giraffes and sometimes kids freak out at their tongues. Also the music is up loud anyway, and I’m busy with the closer’s list. Then the screaming went away, and then everything was pretty quiet for a while. Did you hear the guns?”
The girl’s voice is still so loud. Joan fights the urge to shake her. We are going to die if you keep talking like this, she wants to say. She understands, logically, a soundproof door, but logic is not asserting itself.
“We heard them from a distance,” Joan says calmly. Logically. “He and I were in the woods in the children’s area. I didn’t know the sound was gunfire.”
Lincoln drops his potato masher, and he stands up to retrieve it. The older woman hands it to him. He takes it from her cautiously.
The girl is nodding enthusiastically. “Me neither. They were far away at first. We were already closed—door locked and everything—and I was back here when I heard somebody at the door.”
“Shhh,” Joan says, unable to help herself. “A little quieter.”
“They can’t hear us,” the girl repeats.
The white-haired woman reaches out a hand, touching the girl’s arm. Not a light touch but a firm one, her manicured hand closing on the arm.
“Shush,” says the woman, and there is a surprising authority in her voice. “She’s right. Keep your voice down.”
The girl looks surprised, but she nods. The woman pats her arm before she lets it go.
“Very good,” says the older woman.
Joan considers her again, reassessing.
“Anyway,” says the girl, finally whispering, “I was marrying the ketchups—it always gets on my hands, and no matter how hard you try there’s splotches on your arms and wrists, and you don’t notice it until it’s dried, and I heard a knocking, and at first I thought someone maybe needed to use the bathroom.”
The girl stretches her thin legs out straight, then she folds them on top of each other like origami. She is always moving.
Lincoln is watching the girl now, eyes big and attentive. The potato masher is forgotten.
“No,” the girl says, chewing again, “do you know what I actually thought? Did I say how I used to work at Hawaiian Ice? The lady who runs it goes to my church. Anyway, there was this old woman who came in every Saturday—”
The girl pauses, but she never seems to be looking for a response. The pauses are only part of her rhythm.
“She always wanted to touch my hair,” she continues. “Ladies do that sometimes, white ladies, no offense, but she just wouldn’t leave until she’d felt my hair, and sometimes she’d run late, and I’d have closed the windows because it was closing time, and she’d bang until I opened.”
This pause seems like an opportunity. Joan is no longer sure the girl can stop herself.
“But you were telling me about the gunmen?” she prompts.
“Yeah. So I cracked open this door”—the girl nods at the solid door over her shoulder—“and I could see the men kick the side door open, and I could see the gun. Like a rifle or something? They came inside and started tossing things, and that was stupid, don’t you think? I mean, I wouldn’t have known they were here if they’d been quiet about it. But when the two of them came in and started wrecking everything, I just locked this door behind me. The lock’s on the inside. Somebody got stuck in here one time, I think. You can unlock it from outside, too, but you need the key, and I have the only one. So it’s safe in here.”
The girl swallows whatever she was chewing.
“She’s wearing a hat,” announces Lincoln.
“You like hats?” asks the girl, touching her beret.
He nods. It has been years since he would watch the sidewalks, scanning crowds of pedestrians and bikers, and he would point his finger as he named headgear. Hat. Helmet. Hat. Hat. Helmet, he would call out.
“I still haven’t seen the men myself,” says the older woman, flexing her leg with a grimace. “I would have walked straight into them if Kailynn hadn’t grabbed me. What about you?”
“We were nearly to the exit when I saw them,” Joan says. “Then I ran up to the old porcupine exhibit.”
The older woman smiles down at Lincoln. It is a nice smile, completely detached from everything going on around them. “Did you pretend you were a porcupine? With sharp quills?” The woman taps one curved finger against Lincoln’s head and jerks her hand back. “Ouch!”
Lincoln laughs. It is a shocking, bubbling sound. The light from the window catches the woman’s face, and her expression is cheerful and focused, and Joan has a suspicion.
“Are you a teacher?” she asks.
The woman dips her head, lips curving slightly. “Third grade. Thirty-six years. I retired last year.”
“Which school?”
“Hamilton Elementary.”
At a cocktail party or a luncheon, Joan would say, “Oh, I have a friend who sent both her kids to Hamilton,” and the two of them would keep going in the universal way of small talk, but the back-and-forth of it feels wrong now. She will not act like everything is normal. And she does not want to know more about these people. There is no need for chatter.
Kailynn, the woman said. The girl’s name is Kailynn.
“When you saw the men,” Joan says to Kailynn, “did you see any sign of hostages?”
“Hostages?” the girl says. “Why would they be shooting people if they wanted hostages?”
Joan shakes her head. It doesn’t make sense. Maybe it is a waste of time and energy to even try to fit the pieces of the puzzle together.
“You want to try on my hat?” Kailynn says to Lincoln.
“No, thank you,” he says.
The girl twists around, lifting the flap of a box on her left. With a rustle of cellophane, she pulls out a small bag.
“You know what I have?” Kailynn says. “Some animal crackers.”
Even in the dim light, Joan can see Lincoln’s teeth flash.
7:32 p.m.
Lincoln has nearly finished his animal crackers. Joan supposes it is a good sign that he has an appetite—the thought of eating anything makes her throat close up.
She may not be the only one. The teacher finally gave in to Kailynn’s repeated offers, but she has made no attempt to eat the single cookie she pulled from the bag. She is holding it between her thumb and finger, tapping one lacquered nail against it.
Kailynn does not seem to have any problem with her appetite. She has just torn into another bag. She is also rocking from left to right, swinging her hair from side to side.
The girl is slowly driving Joan crazy.
“You know what I really want?” the girl says, chewing as she talks. “Onion rings. Maybe mashed sweet potatoes and corn on the cob, but not the frozen kind. Do you have a deep fryer?”
Joan shakes her head. So does the teacher.
“I’ve been begging my parents,” Kailynn says, “begging them to get one, because usually I’m the one who makes dinner, and a skillet isn’t the same. With a fryer I could do onion rings or mozzarella sticks. Fried fish. You know, Mom might feel so terrible after this whole mass murder thing that she might buy me one.”
No one answers her.
Kailynn wipes her hands on her jeans
and looks down at Lincoln. “So what’s your name?”
“Lincoln,” he answers, still chewing.
“Like Abraham Lincoln?”
“Yes,” he says.
Joan is not surprised that the girl does not ask her name. No one ever cares about her name anymore.
“You know who Abraham Lincoln is?” the girl is asking.
“Yes,” says Lincoln. “The president. He got assassinated.”
Joan cannot help but smile down at him, knowing it is odd that the word “assassinated” charms her, but, still, how many four-year-olds know it? It is a leftover from when he loved presidents—yet another bygone phase—when he loved that Reagan liked jelly beans and that Nixon liked bowling and that Obama likes basketball. He liked George Washington’s wig. He liked Franklin Roosevelt’s wheelchair. When they played doctor, she would examine him and tell him he had an ear infection or a bellyache. He would tell her that she had polio.
A soccer game on the front porch: he wanted to be Gerald Ford, and she would be Ronald Reagan. Gerald Ford is showing control, he yelled, one foot on the ball. Gerald Ford is kicking and . . . Gerald Ford scores! Ronald Reagan is trying to take the ball from Gerald Ford! Ronald Reagan kicks the ball out of bounds!
“He kept papers in his hat,” Lincoln is saying.
“How did you know we were outside, Kailynn?” Joan asks.
She is wondering how obvious they were as they crept through the dark, as she tried to scan every inch around them and not step on a single dry leaf. She also remembers the darkened Koala Café they passed on their way out of the Woodlands and the Kid Zone, with the chairs on the tables and no sign of life, but, of course, there might have been zoo workers in there, too. They might have been tucked away in the kitchen or crouched down behind the cash registers, a few steps away from where she put her palm against the door. Maybe she has passed a dozen people holed up in safe places, watching through darkened windows, and maybe all of them let her pass by without a word.
Small fingers reaching, hands patting.
She could tell the others. The thought keeps rising. She could tell them about the baby, and she could even go get the baby and bring it here, absolve herself of her sins, and she tells herself that she does not do it because if she got herself shot, then where would Lincoln be? And also what if the room is not so soundproof and the wailing baby brings death down on them all? But these reasons are not what keep her quiet.
She cannot imagine telling them. She cannot imagine telling anyone.
Kailynn is answering her.
“And then I heard the snack machine,” she is saying. “You can hear the vibration through the wall. I go out there and get Paydays on my break sometimes, and I heard the sound. So I looked out and saw you just as you were going into the plants. And I waited a while, and I planned to get you when you came back past the door, but you didn’t come out. So I opened the door and came and got you. It’s not safe out there.”
Joan still cannot make sense of the girl. With her animal crackers and her endless mindless chatter, she does not seem like the heroic type. But she has risked herself to lead them to safety—there is no denying it.
Kailynn brushes the crumbs from her jeans. “I promise they can’t get inside. There’s no reason to worry.”
Maybe the girl is neither heroic nor mindless. Maybe she is only confident in the way that sixteen-year-olds can be. She is swinging her hair again, flipping it from one shoulder to the other. Back and forth, back and forth.
Joan looks away. She feels better when she cannot see the girl. The teacher has the right idea: she is sitting there, eyes closed. Silent and apart. She is still holding her untouched cookie in her hand, and she’s shifting it between her fingers like a talisman.
Then, as if feeling Joan watching her, the teacher opens her eyes.
“Everything’s going to be fine,” she says, in a tone that is calm and slightly condescending, and Joan wonders why she is speaking now and why these are the words she has chosen.
“Will it?” Joan answers, probably more sharply than she should.
“God wouldn’t bring us this far just to let us die,” says the teacher.
Joan forces a smile. She does not bother to tell the woman that she does not believe God brought them here at all. What does that even mean? Did he bring the gunmen here, too? Those dead bodies on the concrete—was he guiding them along?
“We’ve been lucky so far,” says the teacher, rubbing at her knee. “Someone is taking care of us.”
“That’s a nice thought,” Joan says, and now she is the one who sounds condescending. And the truth is that she feels condescending and she dislikes this woman’s too-perfect hairstyle and her naive answers, but it is not the woman’s fault that she believes stupid things.
Joan tries again.
“It’s nice of you to say,” she says, and her voice is better this time. She appreciates that, to her credit, the woman only nods and closes her eyes again.
Lincoln drops his empty bag to the ground and pushes himself to his feet. He must be feeling at ease, because he is moving away, knees bending and straightening, feet not quite leaving the floor. He bounces toward the far wall, where he will likely trip on the lid of an opened box of paper plates. But it is good to see him letting go of her.
“You’re going to trip on that box,” Joan tells him.
“No, I’m not,” he says.
She watches him, and, next to her, the girl is swinging her hair.
“Do you know what my dad used to always do?” Kailynn says. “We’d play hide-and-seek—”
“Can you shut up?” interrupts Joan. “For God’s sake! Just for a little while can you please shut up?”
She regrets the words as soon as they leave her mouth, and then she catches the look on Lincoln’s face, and everything is worse.
“Mommy,” he says, and his eyes are huge.
Joan takes a breath. She is not sure she has ever seen him disappointed in her. The teacher is staring at her, too, disapproving. And the look on Kailynn’s face is worse. Wounded.
“I know I talk a lot,” the girl says. “I’m sorry.”
“No, I’m sorry,” says Joan. “I shouldn’t have said that. Go on and tell me about your dad.”
She does not really expect the girl to keep talking. And there is a part of her actually hoping that Kailynn is the kind of overly sensitive, sullen teenager who will sulk and withdraw. But, no, the girl is apparently resilient.
“Well,” Kailynn says, cautiously, hopefully, as if Joan might change her mind, “so we would play hide-and-seek. With my dad. And me and my sister would always be the ones to hide, and my dad would seek, but he would always do it with big scary steps and heavy breathing, where you’d be shaking when you heard him coming. And then everything would go silent, and you’d know he was close, and then there he’d be—his hand grabbing at you under the bed or yanking the sheets of the laundry, and you’d just scream and scream. He loved to scare us. He’d always laugh.”
Joan thinks the girl’s father must be a dick, not that it matters.
“One time,” the girl continues, “I was hiding in the closet, and he jerked open the door, and I was so surprised I fell backward into a shelf and I cut my arm and it was bleeding and it was, like, more blood than I’d ever seen come out of me. I couldn’t stop crying.”
“Did he laugh?” asks Joan, without meaning to say anything.
“No. He picked me up, and I could see how bad he felt—he kept saying he was sorry, over and over—and he wrapped a paper towel over my cut and set me in his lap, and I was still crying and he told me to be brave and I told him I couldn’t because I was bleeding. Then he picked up a knife off the counter and he cut himself across his arm, just sliced his arm right there in front of me. And then he was bleeding, too, and he held out his arm and he said, ‘Breathe with me, baby g
irl, in and out. You and me together.’ And I did. And then we put on Band-Aids.”
Joan can see this. She sees it more clearly than she wants to. She can see the tears coming down Kailynn’s face, and she would have had pigtails, surely, when she was little, maybe with barrettes, and she can see a little bloody arm and a father making himself bleed.
She smiles at the girl. A girl who saw men waving guns and people falling down dead. A girl who left her safe hiding place to come help people she had never even met.
“Breathing helps sometimes,” Joan says.
Kailynn tilts her head forward, hair rocking from side to side, and for the moment the motion does not grate on Joan. It is a child’s habit, she thinks. It is a comfort, maybe, the feel of hair swishing.
“I want him to be here,” Kailynn says softly.
Joan leans in closer. It is the first sign since they’ve been shut in this room together that the girl truly understands that she is here, in the middle of this reality, feeling anything like the actual weight of it.
“Yeah,” says Joan.
“You wish your dad was here?”
Joan sorts through possible answers to that question.
“Well,” she says, “my dad had a lot of big guns.”
Kailynn laughs, only a quiet giggle. Joan feels something loosen inside her, and she is not sure whether the looseness is good or bad.
“Why are you the one who cooks dinner?” Joan asks.
“Mom and Dad both work late,” the girl says. “And I like cooking.”
“My daughter made cakes,” says the teacher, eyes closed. “Five or six layers. Back when she was still a little thing. Like you see in a bakery.”
Joan studies the woman, who seems relaxed enough that she might fall asleep at any moment. Her hair is smooth and unruffled, and the pendant of her elegant necklace is perfectly centered at her throat. She is so calm. Maybe she is praying. And Joan can admit that it is appealing to believe that they are being watched over. That God is with them. She would like to believe it. She is turning the idea around in her head when Lincoln, hopping up and down, side to side—an uncoordinated dervish—falls backward as he collides with the box she has already warned him about.